Movies must sacrifice some historical accuracy in the name of great storytelling. But here are a few places where we wish they had gotten it right.

300

300

Error: Armorless Spartans

The 2007 movie 300 set a new standard for over-the-top cinematic warfare with its fictionalized retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. (The sequel is coming in March.) The film stretches the truth in plenty of places to heighten the action; one error that has always bugged me is that the movie's über-macho soldiers fight bare-chested.

Several experts say the Spartan always wore armor. John Burgess, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer, says there were different levels of armor: The archers wore lighter armor, for example. It's conceivable, he says, that some Spartans had no armor, but that would be the case only if they were new recruits with no money.

Battleship

Battleship

Error: Firing up a battleship in a few minutes

Okay, it's hard to quibble with the minor technical inaccuracies in a movie that features aliens shooting at battleships. But one of the most egregious comes late in the movie, when Taylor Kitsch's character turns to a group of war veterans who fire up the USS Missouri—in about 5 minutes. It's all in good fun, but a decommissioned battleship would take several days to prep for battle. And the Missouri isn't just a decommissioned WWII-era ship. It's currently a museum.

"Consider that our admittedly older hospital ships take five days to get underway, although that isn't just restricted to the boiler," says Michael James Barton, a former deputy director for the Middle East office of the Pentagon and a former U.S. Air Force reservist who is now a director at Artis Research. "But in a movie about a board game I would not expect much realism."